


to build a home

by Xanisis



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: M/M, connor likes it, i have far too much headcanon for a couple that barely interacts on screen, wes is a puppy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-15
Updated: 2014-10-15
Packaged: 2018-02-21 08:01:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2460857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xanisis/pseuds/Xanisis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Moments don’t make a relationship, Connor knows this, but sometimes he wishes. Moments are all he’s got.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to build a home

The first time Connor sees the boy in class all he sees is a lanky frame and puppy dog eyes, and he thinks that someone is going to eat him alive.  (He has no idea how wrong he is.)

 

.

 

He walks into the office late at night and sees Wes seated in the corner, the glow from the lamp casting parts of his face in shadows, darkening the hollows of his eyes. He looks young, like he’s still in high school, all jeans and unbuttoned shirts and childhood innocence

 

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

 

Wes looks up, eyebrows furrowed, “Professor Keating asked me to go over the reports and have the questions on her desk by tomorrow morning.”

 

“I didn’t mean here as in this office. I meant law school. What are you doing in law school?”

 

Wes tilts his head, as if he doesn’t see that him and his plaid and his soft voice and softer eyes don’t fit in with all the other kids here, all competition and sleaze and everything that Connor is (and secretly hates).

 

“I want to be a lawyer,” he says, shifting the papers in his lap as if the conversation is over. Who knows? Maybe it is. Maybe it’s that simple for him.

 

Connor chuckles. “Of course you do, Wait List.”

 

(He thinks that he won’t last the month.)

 

.

 

The number one thing that Connor finds attractive is usefulness, which is something that Wes Gibbons lacks in spades, so Connor doesn’t know why his eyes follow him when he crosses the room, why they settle on him in class when Connor doesn’t mean them to, why sometimes he closes his eyes when he can’t sleep and sees Wes’s face. It’s not like he hadn’t noticed that Wes was attractive, he had the whole boy next door, small town, kind of vibe going. And if that was your thing, great, but it had never appealed to Connor. (But sometimes his eyes wander.)

 

.

 

“So, do you have a thing for Wait List?” Michaela asks him one night.

 

It’s late and the words on the page are swimming in front of his eyes and he thinks maybe he heard her wrong.

 

“What?”

 

She looks over at him with that look that he hates, somewhere between annoyance and condescension and glee.

 

“You heard me,” she says, flipping the page.

 

“I do not have a thing for Wes Gibbons,” he says.

 

“If you say so,” she says, eyes returning to the case report on her lap, and how is that more frustrating than her looking at him?

 

“Fuck you,” he says.

 

“It’s not me you want to be fucking,” she says, her lips curling up at the corners.

 

(He wants to hate her, but it’s what he would have said.)

 

.

 

Apparently, Wes has a thing for girls with black hair and big round eyes that say “fuck you” and “save me” at the same time. And he’s not judging his taste or anything, but basically anyone else would be a better choice.

 

“She did it,” Michaela announces after they’ve been staring at the same information for hours, letters swirling about in lazy patterns.

 

“She didn’t do it,” Wes says softly.

 

“I’m sorry your girlfriend is a psychopath, but she definitely did it,” Connor says, stretching his arms behind his head, feeling the joints click into place

 

Wes stands suddenly, knocking some papers off table. They flutter to the ground, the noise as each piece hits the floor is deafening. He looks restless and a little crazed, but more than anything he looks tired, like he hasn’t slept in days. If Connor was somebody else, he would be concerned, would look into Wes’s eyes, darkened with exhaustion, and tell him to get some sleep. But instead he just stares at him, an eyebrow raised in challenge.

 

Wes looks at him for a minute with something like disappointment and for a moment Connor wants Wes to do something crazy like yell or kick something or do anything other than look so fucking wounded all the time. He wants to push all of Wes’s buttons until he breaks and becomes just like the rest of them, a little more human and a little less puppy.

 

But Wes just releases a long breath, the exhale slumping his shoulders and softening the too bright nature of his eyes.

 

“I’m going to go get some air,” he says, grabbing his coat off the coat rack and shouldering it on.

 

Connor watches him go.

 

.

 

Connor’s never been squeamish. He’s watched crime shows since he was six and his parents sat him down in front of the tv and forgot about him, coming back for him minutes, hours, days later and finding him staring at the television, eyes wide, head swimming with death, gunshots echoing in his ears instead of nursery rhymes. He’s seen pictures of bodies from every angle, from every type of crime, counted the droplets of blood scattered across the walls. And he’s never even flinched. But there is something different about the reality of death, something terrible in the blood coating his hands, sticky and slick, and the passage of time, infinite and instant, and the sprawl of the body, just lying there, an empty shell, and the horror, immediate and overwhelming. It’s so wrong that Connor feels like he might puke, his stomach clenching and unclenching like a heartbeat.

 

And then there’s Wes, all cool head and keeping people together and strength that Connor would never have imagined that he possessed. How do you do it? Connor wonders as he watches Wes stuff the supplies back in his backpack, zipping the bag and throwing it over his shoulder and turning to Michaela, tugging her arms out from where they’re clutching her body and whispering into her ear until the light returns to her eyes. How are you not falling apart at the seams? (How are you not like me? Broken.) But he’s not. And Connor thinks he underestimated him all those months ago, he’ll last much longer than the rest of them will.

 

.

 

Connor hears a knock on his door and opens it to find Wes standing there, holding a duffel and looking haunted.

 

“I couldn’t sleep,” he says like that explains why he’s standing in Connor’s doorway at 2:46 in the morning.

 

“And?” Connor asks, leaning against the doorframe. Maybe he’s sadistic, but he wants to make Wes say it, to spell out the horror and the loneliness. (To say that he needs Connor as much as Connor needs him.)

 

He shrugs, the movement noncommittal and non-confrontational and so thoroughly Wes that Connor feels himself slumping.

 

(And maybe he’s making a better him a better person or something), because Connor just sighs and says, “Yeah, me neither.”

 

It sounds too frank and honest in the silence of the early morning air, (but maybe they reached that point sometime after Sam Keating’s body hit the floor.)

 

“Do you want to come in?” he asks.

 

“Yeah,” Wes says, and he looks nothing like the boy he was three months ago, but Connor doesn’t even know if he would recognize himself in the mirror anymore (and they burned a body together today) so that has to count for something.

 

.

 

“I don’t do friends,” he tells Wes, and pretends he doesn’t notice the hurt look that Wes gives him, like he’s stolen his teddy bear.

 

He pretends he doesn’t feel a corresponding pain in his chest.

 

(But it still hurts.)

 

.

 

The police sirens come and take Wes away and Connor just stands there shocked, because he’s fucking Wait List and he’s Wes and he’s so good, so intrinsically good, (and maybe the only actually good person Connor knows) and nothing bad is supposed to happen to the good guys. Wes meets Connor’s eyes before they put him in the squad car, red and blue lights obscuring his irises, and it’s like he’s trying to tell Connor something, but he doesn’t know what. (He wishes he knew what.)

 

.

 

He doesn’t know what he’s doing here, he just knows that he kept imagining Wes in some stupid orange jumpsuit and it had made him so fucking angry and he’d gotten in his car and suddenly he was at the jail. (And maybe he’d missed him or something.)

 

“Connor,” Wes says when he enters the room like he’s the last person he expected to see. Connor’s not surprised, (he doesn’t really believe he’s here either).

 

Connor tries not to stare at Wes, studies the fraying seam at his shoulder instead, focusing on the patchy orange fabric. He’s worried about what he would say if he met Wes’s eyes.

 

“Why are you here?” Wes asks after what seems like an eternity in the silence.

 

Connor can hear the buzz of the fluorescent lights and the bang of a door closing down the hall and the steady hum of the air around them (and all the words stuck in his throat that he’ll never actually say.)

 

“I don’t know,” he says. “I really don’t know.”

 

(But he knows. He knows exactly why he’s there.)

 

.

 

Wes comes home (it’s weird what Connor considers home now) in a flurry of activity. Everyone is crowding around him and hugging and there’s laughter and tears and it looks like something right out of Hallmark card, besides the bare floor and the haunted look in Annalise’s eyes as she stands in the doorway and all the things that are still left unsaid. Connor stands off to the side and doesn’t touch him and pretends he doesn’t notice when Michaela shoots him a knowing look.

 

But Wes crowds in his space anyway, throwing his arms around his neck and hugging him. Connor wraps hesitant arms around the other boy (man) and lets himself pull Wes closer for an instant before releasing.

 

“Thank you,” Wes says, face close enough to his that Connor almost wants to read something into it.

 

“It was nothing,” he says, but he thinks back to his time on the stand, the stress and the fear and the lies and truths they had all woven together in order to get Wes off.

 

“Nah, it wasn’t,” Wes says, eyes a touch too serious for his tone of voice.

 

“No. It wasn’t,” he says, (but it had been nice to pretend).

 

.

 

Moments don’t make a relationship, Connor knows this, but sometimes he wishes. Moments are all he’s got.

  
  
  



End file.
